Traveler Magazine October Issue

Volume 1, Issue 2 n October 2012

Dripping Springs Garden Local community helps preserve the environment

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Issue 2 - October 2012

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Editor’s Note:

T

hank you for picking up the second edition of the Arkansas Traveler Magazine.

I am very glad I got the opportunity to spearhead this project and produce, what I believe to be, a wonderful medium to showcase the literary prowess of our journalism students. We have indepth features ranging from a heart-touching profile on a Joplin survivor where the writer takes us back to the day of the tornado to an investigative piece on a Fayetteville politician. Reporters worked for months on their stories -- interviewing, researching, gathering facts and writing.

I am also glad that this year we were able to include two photo essays, both of which tell amazing stories through photography. Whitney Green takes us to the tent cities in Fayetteville, where the homeless reside, and Stephen Ironside’s vibrant photos illustrate the Dripping Springs Garden.

I had a great time working with the writers, photographers and designers. I learned a lot through these photos and stories and I hope readers find it just as interesting, knowledgeable and gain new perspective.

Cheers, Saba Naseem Editor-in-Chief

Cover photo and inside cover: Stephen Ironside

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119 Kimpel Hall University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR 72701 Main 479 575 3406

Editorial

Saba Naseem Editor-in-Chief

Gareth Patterson Photo Editor Emily Rhodes Designer Writers: Brady Tackett Sarah Guinn Emily Jones Yani Ko Jimmy Carter

Photographers: Stephen Ironside Addison Morgan Jacki Frost Whitney Green Gareth Patterson

Advertising & Design Staff Elizabeth Birkinsha Advertising Manager Caty Mills Account Manager

Jeremy Johns Account Manager

Kayla Nicole Hardy Account Representative

Amy Butterfield Account Representative

Emmy Miller Graphic Designer

Guy Smith III Graphic Designer

Chelsea Williams Account Manager

The Arkansas Traveler strives for accuracy in its reporting and will correct all matters of fact. If you believe the paper has printed an error, please notify the editor at 479-575-8455 or at traveler@uark.edu.

IN THIS ISSUE: 4 The Disappearing Man 24 Dealing with Death

by Brady Tackett

by Emily Jones

10 Hanging On

30 Wildlife Rehab

by Sarah Guinn

16 Beyond the Rubble: Surviving the Tornado

by Sarah Guinn 20 Tent Cities

by Whitney Green

by Yani Ko

36 Dripping Springs

by Stephen Ironside

40 Redemption Denied

by Jimmy Carter

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Don Marr, the chief of staff for Mayor Lioneld Jordan of Fayetteville, Ark., in his office on February 22, 2012.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 4

The Disappearing Man By: Brady Tackett Photos: Stephen Ironside

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F

or two years, Carole Hipskind had sought to collect $3,080 that she claimed Don Marr, her former boss, owed her for unpaid salary and vacation hours.

Now the trial date – Oct. 3, 2011 – had finally arrived. Hipskind waited anxiously with her lawyer outside the courtroom.

Marr never appeared.

“We sit out in the hall, and finally at 10, we go in, and the deputy says, ‘What are you guys doing here? We don’t have a case today,’” Hipskind said.

Ronald Woodruff, Hipskind’s lawyer, insisted that the deputy was mistaken.

“So the deputy disappears and comes back with a lady, who goes, ‘We cancelled this case. We heard Don filed bankruptcy.’”

Hipskind is just one of many plaintiffs seeking payment from Marr, who became Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s chief of staff in 2009 after a series of failed business ventures.

Marr, 48, now earns a healthy salary of $111,324. But Hipskind, like many who have brought suits against Marr, has yet to receive any money.

Hipskind worked as the office manager for both of Marr’s now-defunct human relations companies, HR Factor and Back Office Specialist Support, in the late 2000s. They developed a strong relationship during those years, she said.

“I was the last one that worked for him. I stayed all through the thick and thin,” Hipskind said. “He taught me so much. He introduced me to all kinds of people. He did wonderful things for me – he just didn’t pay me.”

A judge eventually heard Hipskind’s case and ruled that Marr’s wages be garnished to her. But someone else beat her to it – Hipskind won’t re-

Don Marr (left), the chief of staff for Mayor Lioneld Jordan of Fayetteville, Ark. (right), share a moment at an Arkansas Razorback Baseball game at Baum Stadium in Fayetteville on March 16, 2012.

ceive anything until another of Marr’s debts is paid.

“I’m waiting in line,” she said.

Though he’s the chief of staff for a popular Fayetteville mayor, Marr carries plenty of baggage into the reelection bid. With the November election fast approaching, Marr’s financial woes still decorate the front pages of local newspapers.

“People who are on the opposite side of you find an item that will be personal and embarrass you, either to make you quiet about it or to attack you with it,” Marr said.

It wasn’t always like this. Marr’s financial woes were preceded by years of corporate success in the human resources industry.

Within 10 years of obtaining a busiThe Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 6

ness management degree from Radford University in Virginia, Marr was vice president of Brewer Personnel Services in Springdale, Ark. In 1999, he was named State Human Resources Professional of the Year.

One year later, Marr was named COO of Staffmark, a position that shaped his career and marked his entrance into the Northwest Arkansas elite. He was just 35.

“Even in college, I just told myself they don’t hire people in HR unless they’ve got gray hair and been at a company for a while. I had convinced myself it was not a job you get into until you’re in your 40s or 50s,” Marr said.

He was an exception to that rule and he knew it.

as

When Marr arrived at Staffmark, it was a tiny, 10-person HR company.

During his 12-year stint there, the company transformed into a $1.2 billion international enterprise, he said.

“It went from three offices in Fayetteville, Springdale and Rogers to nine countries and 27 states,” Marr said. “If someone had said to me, ‘You’re going to be chief operating officer of a billion-dollar company,’ I would have laughed at them.”

The company, which opened offices in cities from London to New York, became Marr’s greatest managerial success. He oversaw three divisions with sales revenue growth of more than $600 million, he said. One of his chief duties was financial management.

“Don was extremely successful here in his early years,” Hipskind said.

“He had a phenomenal job. He owned a beautiful home on Mount Nord, which overlooks the city. I mean, he was doing all the right things. I don’t know where the tide turned.”

Things changed for Marr when he left Staffmark in 2002 to pursue a career in city politics. He had served on the Fayetteville Planning Commission since 1996, and in 2001 he won a seat on the city council.

When he recalls that transition, Marr speaks of a separation between his business experience and his governmental positions. But his corporate rhetoric often leaks into his political speech.

“Every taxpayer is a customer, and you can’t fire your customers like you can in private business,” he said. “In government, you have 73,374 bosses.”

Marr served as Lioneld Jordan’s campaign manager in 2008 and became chief of staff when the mayor took office the following year.

“He’s fantastic. He’s one of the best people I’ve ever worked for,” Marr said.

“I’m private, he’s public,” Marr said. “He loves going door to door.

He walked 18,000 households himself when he ran. I would rather pull my fingernails out.”

Marr met Jordan during his eightyear stint on Fayetteville City Council.

They are an unlikely duo considering their dissimilar backgrounds.

While Marr was an HR superstar, Jordan, who Marr described as a “la-

bor union activist,” won notoriety after he spearheaded a campaign to prevent Chancellor John A. White from outsourcing facility workers’ jobs at the University of Arkansas.

“We both came from totally opposite professions. Him trying to organize workers and me trying not to,” Marr said.

Both men describe the other with admiration.

“I liked him from the very moment I met him,” Mayor Jordan said. “We may have come from opposite sides of the fence, but we have a kind of understanding between us. He and I fit well together.”

While Jordan is “out in the public making speeches,” Marr, who answers only to the mayor, “runs the day-to-day operations of the city.

“He’s been an excellent chief of staff,” Jordan said. “I couldn’t have anybody better.”

As Marr’s political career began to lift off, he again ventured into business by founding two HR companies: HR Factor and BOSS. Managing the businesses allowed him a flexible schedule, which became more important during his service as an alderman. The companies also provided something Marr consistently strived for: financial control.

“I think what I learned in that is that good ideas don’t necessarily mean good business plans,” Marr said.

BOSS attempted to handle the administrative duties typically performed by volunteers. That approach proved unprofitable.

“Their expectations are more in line when they’re doing it themselves than when they’re paying someone to

He did wonderful things for me­—he just didn’t pay me

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Don Marr (center),Terry Gulley (left), director of the City of Fayetteville Transportation Department and Brad Robins (right) inspect the construction process of a new section of multiuse trail near the Pauline Whitaker Arena.

do it,” Marr said of nonprofit organizations. “Then, what they want and what they’re willing to pay aren’t always aligned.”

HR Factor and BOSS crashed during the 2008 recession, leaving Marr with few assets and a list of unpaid business partners.

One such partner was Gray Matters, which publishes the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and other publications. HR Factor ran two fullpage ads in the Journal in 2008.

“It’s very rare for us to have somebody to come in and not pay us,” said Rob Gutterridge, associate publisher for Gray Matters.

The price for the ads totaled $4,030.

But Marr’s payment never arrived.

The incident occurred before Gutterridge joined the company, but Gutterridge said he had heard the story many times from upper-level management at Gray Matters.

“We sent him two collections, we took him to civil court – we’ve done all sorts of different things on that client and never received any payment

Marr inspects a tunnel being constructed on a new section of multiuse trail near the Pauline Whitaker Arena off of Garland Avenue in Fayetteville on April 12, 2012.

whatsoever,” Gutterridge said.

Months stretched on. It was in 2011, nearly three years after the ads ran, that Gray Matters finally received a letter from Marr’s lawyer.

“Basically, there was a letter turned in by his attorney telling us, ‘Sorry, I’m just not going to pay you guys.’ And there’s really not much you can do about it,” Gutterridge said.

Eventually, Gray Matters wrote the debt off as a loss.

Around the same time, Marr was hit with another suit, this one from Staffmark, the company that made Marr’s career. The company sought a balance of $6,756.49 for a business transaction with BOSS, according to court records. The default judgment found Marr “wholly and completely in default.”

According to court records, Marr had evaded calls and emails from Staffmark, just as he had done with Gray Matters management and as he would later do with his longtime office manager, Carole Hipskind.

In April 2009, after many of her The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 8

emails went unanswered, Hipskind sent a warning to Marr’s city office email account: “I need to have this matter resolved by 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 or I will be forced to file a claim with Small Claims Court.”

Last year, Michael Holloman, a longtime friend and prominent Springdale psychiatrist, also filed a civil suit against Marr. Holloman cosigned a $165,000 loan for Marr in 2007, right around the time his businesses began to fail.

Holloman, who did not respond to phone calls, claimed Marr had come to him distressed because a former employer had accused Marr of embezzlement.

“Marr informed Holloman that Marr was currently at risk of criminal charges being filed by the former employer if the Marr Note” – the $165,000 loan – “was not executed,” according to a formal complaint letter filed against Marr on July 12, 2011.

Marr began making payments of $2,000 per month to the Bank of Fay-

Don Marr, the chief of staff for Mayor Lioneld Jordan of Fayetteville, Ark., enjoys an Arkansas Razorback Baseball game at Baum Stadium in Fayetteville on March 16, 2012.

etteville, according to the complaint, but he missed payments in October and December of 2008 and in February 2010.

Soon, Holloman had covered $17,200 of Marr’s payments in addition to the $129,751.22 due on the loan. Holloman accused Marr of lying about the embezzlement accusations to secure his signature on the loan, according to the complaint.

“It does not inspire confidence to be told that a public official once expressed concern about being accused of embezzlement,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editors wrote in a June 18 editorial.

“Mr. Marr was quick to insist ‘no criminal charges were ever filed.’ But who says they were? He was only said to have been concerned that they might be, and that’s worrisome enough where a top city official is concerned,” they wrote.

On Aug. 14 – five years after Holloman co-signed the loan with Marr – a Fayetteville judge approved a settlement for Marr to repay more than

$140,000 plus interest.

But an unknown number of Marr’s debts remain. In 2010, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien against Marr for nearly $104,000 in unpaid taxes, and the filings do not indicate whether Marr has begun to pay them.

Marr nervously tapped a pen on his office desk when asked about the suits.

“It made me sick at my stomach,” Marr said. “You don’t go into any business transaction thinking it will fail. My failure in that affected these people who are owed things,” he said, trailing off.

Marr said the garnishment on his salary is the maximum amount allowed by state law. His foremost fear, he said, is that his debts will negatively affect the mayor’s reelection campaign.

“If it affects him negatively in the election, I wouldn’t stay. If it makes it a credibility issue on him, I will not let him bear that. It’s not his to bear,” Marr said.

“He knows and the council knows and the staff knows that not one time The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 9

has any of that stuff ever come into the workplace, because I understand that separation.”

Mayor Jordan agreed.

“That’s a private matter. Everybody’s private life is their private life,” he said. “He does not handle any of the finances of the city. [Financial Director] Paul Becker handles the finances.”

On May 7, former Fayetteville Mayor Dan Coody announced he would challenge Jordan in the upcoming race for the mayor’s seat.

Jordan, who is very popular among Fayetteville citizens, already beat Coody in a runoff election in 2008.

His chances for reelection are great.

The only wild card in Jordan’s stacked deck is Marr, whose unpaid debts bring unwanted scrutiny to the mayor’s office. Will Jordan keep him?

“Absolutely,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hipskind, the IRS and an unknown number of others Marr owes, continue to wait by the courtroom doors.

A lonely steel cross stands tall, held by only three support beams, the church that once stood with it now gone. An EF-5 tornado swept away a place I knew so well, and though my permanent address wasn’t at this place on 25th Street in Joplin, it was a place I had learned to call home.

By: Sarah Guinn, Photos: Addison Morgan, Sarah Guinn, Jacki Frost

The May 22, 2011 tornado claimed all of St. Mary’s Catholic Church except this steel cross, which, for some, has become a symbol of hope The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 10 following the storm.

Demolished buildings and rubble is a majority of what the EF-5 tornado left in its seven mile path through south Joplin.

J

oplinites woke up just as usual that morning, May 22, 2011. Churches that seem to be on every corner of this town of 50,000 held their Sunday morning services and that warm summer breeze filled the air. Although summer didn’t officially begin for another month, it already felt like a wonderful summer day.

This had only been my second weekend at home from my junior year at the University of Arkansas and I was ready to spend my time off with family and catch up with my Joplin friends.

My high school friends that I still stick by – Kate, Ali, Jamie, and the group – were going to meet up that Sunday evening for dinner and then take the short drive just outside of Joplin and get our thrills of local phenomenon, the Spooklight. Kate and I texted each other Sunday afternoon finalizing that night’s plans. Since her house was only a few minutes away, she agreed to come pick me up at 6:30 p.m. Kate’s silver car never made it to my family’s driveway.

I knew a storm was coming, but I had no idea of its magnitude. I looked at the radar on my laptop. A massive chunk of red cells, signifying a storm with strength, was just outside of Joplin and looked like it was about to move across the town.

My father and I went outside, stood on our backyard deck and looked west. The storm clouds,

thick and rounded with blackness, were there, but this didn’t concern me. I’ve lived in tornado alley my entire life and experienced the straight-line wind storms that happen from time to time and the wicked thunderstorms that roll through during the summer months.

But I did remember a weather alert that appeared on my phone just hours before, telling me that a tornado watch had been issued. I surveyed the sky. No green aura that they say sometimes signifies a tornado.

The clouds began to burst, the small raindrops falling around my father and me. The wind blew; something a little stronger than the gentle soothing breeze from just hours before. I turned and looked at the door that led to the garage – the lights had gone out. Something had already knocked out our electricity. And then the tornado sirens wailed.

“Really?” I thought to myself. It frustrated me to hear the sirens since it appeared that 90 percent of the time, they weren’t necessary, citing Dopplerindicated tornadoes instead of those that have been spotted on the ground.

We moved inside and waited for the storm to pass. Within minutes, the rain fell harder and the wind thrashed it against the house, making it difficult to see outside. The sun-shiny day faded away and it was almost as dark as night.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 11

On South Main Street, residents have turned the wall of a building into a public canvas for expressing their hope, faith and resilience, an inspiration for all during an emotionally taxing time of rebuilding.

I was able to watch a gust of wind litter the yard with paper, trash and pages from books among other things. I moved to the back of the house, to my parent’s bedroom with them and saw the wind blow over our backyard fence. A straight-line windstorm from 2009 had blown it down before and I was getting frustrated that we’d have to replace it again. I stood with my parents at their bedroom window and we listened to the storm outside. My mother and I heard something unusual. There are train tracks just beyond the backyard fence. Our house vibrates and shakes, slightly, as the train rolls through every day.

We heard the train. No whistle, of course. But that choochoo, locomotive feel – the speed and strength of a coalfilled engine – seemed to be just around the bend. But the train never came. It was the tornado ­– the tornado that, unknown to me at the time, had swept away things familiar to me from St. John’s hospital, to St. Mary’s church and almost every school that I attended in Joplin.

We never ducked for cover. Never hid in the closet or packed together in the hallway. After the storm passed, we joined the other neighbors who had stepped outside to see what had just happened. Everyone was in disarray. Pieces of insulation landed on our front porch from somewhere.

My mother panicked and thought people in our neighborhood had lost their homes. But the houses around, including our own, were intact. A pear tree in our front yard, however, was pulled straight up and tossed across the driveway. It somehow left my sister’s car as well as my own, unharmed. Pieces of paper and curious things laid in

our yard, however, waiting to be discovered. I knew that something significant had just happened, but the puzzle pieces had been dumped out in front of us and we were just beginning to put it together.

The first task was to get the pear tree out of the way.

It pained me having to help my father cut its branches. I loved the pear tree. We worked on dismantling the tree branch by branch and traffic in our neighborhood, 26th Street, began to pick up. A relative of our neighbor’s pulled his pickup truck into his driveway. The man got out, his face colorless and voice full of shock. “Twentieth and Range Line is gone,” he said. Range Line is probably the busiest street in Joplin, and that particular intersection is where popular retail stores such as Walmart, Academy Sports and numerous restaurants are found. Stress and nervousness had worked its way inside me where excitement and happiness to be with friends should have been.

With the driveway clear, my parents, sister and I loaded into my car and embarked on a mission to get across the railroad tracks and check on my grandmother. We started west toward Connecticut Street, which connected to 24th Street, where my grandmother lived. The traffic light at 26th and Connecticut streets wasn’t working and the sky, a strange mixture of pink and darkness, hung with an eerie feel. We turned on to Connecticut, which was flooded with a sea of red, blue ambulance lights mixed with car headlights. Apartment complexes along the street were damaged and I saw people walking down the sidewalk, suitcases in hand. It felt like an apocalypse.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 12

A united community bands together,providing assistance and assuring that no victim is left without basic needs.

RIGHT: A line of freshly constructed telephone poles near the heart of Joplin’s most heavily demolished areas illustrates citizen’s strength to rebuild, a healing process that will take time and courage in the following months.

The rebuilding process has begun, but the extent of the damage to the city creates the illusion that the town was hit a month or two ago, rather than a year.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 13

listened to the local news radio station, KZRG. The announcers listed the shelters set up across town and Memorial Hall had become a triage. People were discouraged from going to Freeman Hospital – located across the street from the damaged St. John’s hospital — unless their wounds were potentially fatal. All of this was information overload in my mind. Before my sister and I turned the radio off, I remember the announcer saying, “Joplin will rise again,” and all the pieces scattered about me started to form a picture. We were in a war zone.

I lay in my bed that night, next to my open window, closed my eyes and tried to drift off to sleep. But I could hear the ambulance sirens wail. The dead and the dying, the people waiting to be pulled from the wreckage, were just blocks away from my bedroom. The sirens didn’t stop until after 2 a.m. Within hours, they wailed again.

A path of fallen bricks, broken glass and other storm debris littered the east side of St. Mary’s Catholic Church as a result of the May 22, 2011 tornado.

We were forced to zigzag through the streets just to get to my grandmother’s place, a trip that normally would last a couple of minutes, but had now turned into an obstacle course and was taking much longer. We eventually made it there and were relieved to see the apartment wasn’t leveled.

Pieces of the roof were missing, but nothing swept away with the wind.

I worried about my friends. Cell phone service was limited, but I texted Kate, who I had planned to go out with that evening. “Are you okay?” I asked her. She never answered.

Jenifer, my cousin in Austin, Texas, called me – it was the only call I was able to take on my phone at the time – and told my family to stay away from St. John’s hospital; that it was in danger of exploding. I was slowly putting the pieces together. Something huge had just happened.

We took my grandmother home with us that night, lit some candles around the dining room table and worked to try to figure out the magnitude of what happened. My father, sister and I had our smartphones, but battery life was precious, so we tried not to waste it. The night rolled in and my parents and grandmother went to bed. But my sister and I yearned for more information.

With the electricity still out – and we assumed it would be out for quite a while – we sat in our mother’s car and

*** In the end, 161 lives were lost. Thousands of homes were leveled. And Joplin bore a scar – the path of the tornado that ripped through the middle of town. I had the opportunity during the summer to see the tornado path from the air. A long, brown path stretched through the town where trees, homes and businesses once were. It seemed to go on for forever.

I measured the path during the summer, watching the odometer in my car. Thirteen miles. From Schifferdecker Avenue to Duquesne, a small area on eastern edge of Joplin. Six of those miles were densely populated sections of town.

My account of the storm isn’t extraordinary. All I can say is that my family is very lucky. The storm destroyed homes along 26th Street, but appeared to turn at Indiana Avenue, the street where Joplin High School was and about a mile away from my home.

When I saw the neighborhoods that I’d driven through countless times, my high school and St. Mary’s, the church that was like a second home to me, my throat tightened, and my stomach dropped. My breathing slowed and all I could do was cup my hand over my mouth. The tears welled in my eyes and I couldn’t believe the destruction. I turned my head to the east and to the west and there was nothing. Nothing but matchstick homes and cluttered

The dead and the dying, the people waiting to be pulled from the wreckage, were just blocks away from my bedroom. The sirens didn’t stop until after 2 a.m. Within hours, they wailed again.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 14

In the path of a deadly vortex, approximately seven miles of homes and businesses in Joplin, Mo. were cleared out May 22, 2011. Despite the devastation, survivors and volunteers carried on with hope.

debris fields.

My friend Kate, who was supposed to pick me up at 6:30 that evening, lost her home. Her family lived across the street from the high school, which was leveled. She gathered with her parents and their two dogs in a crawl space in their house and they were stuck there for two hours, until someone with an ax freed them. *** I interviewed someone with a more extraordinary tornado tale than I earlier this year. Quinton Anderson is a survivor. I met him at a Starbucks in Joplin exactly nine months after the storm. I asked him to take me back to that day. And it went like this.

He lived three blocks away from St. John’s hospital with his parents, Sarah and Bill. The Anderson family knew a storm was coming, and tried to prepare for it. His mother watched the radar on the TV and he stepped outside on the front porch with his father. Quinton told me he saw the tornado move through St. John’s. The Anderson family packed together in their hallway, the only interior structure in the house. The storm moved over them and last thing Quinton remembered was something large had hit his back.

He was found about 50 yards away from his house and a 17 year old, the same age as him, helped take him to Freeman Hospital. It wasn’t until days later that Quinton woke up. He was unconscious and nameless until Wednesday, May 25, when Quinton gave a nurse his father’s cell phone number. His father’s cell phone, found among the rubble of the house by Quinton’s sister, Grace, still worked.

Quinton survived, despite having sustained multiple fractures in his skull, face and back. He also needed skin grafts on both legs due to muscles that were stripped away.

But both of his parents, Sarah and Bill, didn’t make it.

Guilt set in me as he told me this. I had a home. And both parents.

Through all the hardship that he had been through in last several months, though, Quinton displayed a sort-of positive demeanor.

“All of this had to be hard on you,” I said to him, unable to understand his dispassionate tone in his story. “Yes,” he told me. “But it’s how you perceive it. Do you let it consume you? Or do you just…say yeah, it’s there, it’s a part of me that was the past. What’s for me in the future? I guess it’s that decision whether to get up and walk.” *** And then there was St. Mary’s Church.

My parents were married there on a Friday night, November 9, 1979. Both my sister and I were baptized as infants in the church. Every sacrament we have received was done at St. Mary’s. It was where we grew up. We attended St. Mary’s Elementary, the school attached to it. Sherman, the best dog there ever was, was blessed in St. Mary’s parking lot one of those days we could bring pets to school.

My mother and I visited the church just days after the storm. CNN reporters were broadcasting from the parking lot, projecting this place that I called home to the world. I still am unable to fathom the number of people who were watching that newscast and saw that place – St. Mary’s, broken.

It was as if a part of me died when the church came down. But our cross is still standing. Countless news organizations have broadcast to the world that now famous steel cross. It has served as a symbol, for some, that through all the mess and chaos as a result of the storm, there is hope.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 15

Beyond the Rubble: Surviving the Tornado

By: Sarah Guinn, Photos: Addison Morgan

I really did think it was a train. I sensed the steel rails pounded by its vibrations as it hurled down the track just beyond the backyard fence. I heard it hurtling nearer, clocking speeds at 180 miles per hour, not giving a damn with what’s in its way. But no such train existed in that moment. I can close my eyes and only imagine the pressure the monstrous EF-5 bore down on its victims like a rolling pin flattening out dough. You can’t think, can’t move, except for whichever way you’re tossed and tangled on the track.

That train sensation, which topped the EF scale, tore through Joplin, Mo. with a track that began and ended from one end of town to the other – 13 miles in totality, six of which covered the densest sections.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

G

race A nderson and her boyfriend, Shawn Stillions, were heading north on Highway 71 toward Joplin. Around 5:30 p.m., she sent a text to her brother, Quinton.

Storm clouds were heading in, darkening, with rain ready to burst from them. Some wicked storms are known to roar through the Midwest, particularly in the spring, when the cold air is meeting the warm.

Quinton replied at 5:34. It was getting bad and they needed to stay out of Joplin, he told her. The couple reached the Gateway exit, just miles within Joplin.

The radio blared, “A tornado warning has been issued in Jasper County.” The rain clouds had now burst and a nervous air filled the two.

The text message sent and Quinton tossed his phone aside in his bedroom. Quinton’s mother, Sarah, and his father, Bill, scurried about their home, knowing a storm of some sorts was about to approach. Sarah rushed, closing all the windows. She turned on the TV and looked at the radar.

Quinton followed his father outside and stood on their porch. There it was. A big, black mass. Rotating, swirling, destroying virtually everything in its path.

They saw the tornado moving through St. John’s Hospital, only three blocks away. Sarah shut all the doors, and grabbed the family’s two dogs. The An-

derson family packed together in an interior hallway of the home – they didn’t have a basement, so Quinton sat on the south wall, his parents on the north.

He cuddled one of his dogs in his arms, the other too scared and frantic to settle. Sarah fought to control the dog; to keep him with her, but he resisted.

The tornado, with estimated winds of at least 166 miles per hour, ran right over the Anderson home.

“What’s going on?” Quinton thought. He looked up and saw sky. The roof was gone. And then, something large hit his back. *** It was 5:35 p.m. Dan Chatham and his grandparents could feel a storm ready to touchdown.

Grandpa moved the car in the garage to avoid hail damage and grandma sensed a tornado near. After the tornado was set loose, the phone rang. “We were hit with the tornado. I love you,” Dan’s mother said. As soon as the twister moved east and out of the way, Dan and grandpa jumped in the truck and started down 20th Street to check on her. With trees sprawled across the road and debris scattered everywhere, that route wasn’t going to work and it forced them to head north on Maiden Lane toward St. John’s and on to 26th Street. “This is pretty bad,” Dan thought to himself as he saw the destroyed hospital. Insulation, pieces of wood, cars crunched like paper wads and snapped power lines forced the pair to zigzag through the warzone.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 16

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 17

Survivor Quinton Anderson stands on the barren lot where his house once stood, where he and his family took shelter the evening of the tornado.

When the road became impassable, Dan jumped out of the truck and ran to his mom’s house. Murphy Avenue was the street he wanted. He got to the corner and couldn’t ignore what he saw. He found a teenager, same age as him, 17, on his hands and knees, face-down in the gutter. He feared he was dead. He picked him up, put him on the ground. He moaned, and blood flowed out of his nose and mouth. “Just pray,” Dan told him, “Just pray.”

“What’s your name?” Dan asked. The teenager moaned out a response, but Dan couldn’t understand him. By now, Grandpa had got the truck through the debris, loaded the unknown teenager into his pickup ambulance, along with a man with a broken arm, and took them to Freeman Hospital, just a couple of blocks away. *** The tornado left Joplin bruised and broken, having destroyed approximately 30 percent of the city and claimed 161 lives. The days following the storm, Grace, Quinton’s sister, trekked through the tornado zone with Shawn, her boyfriend, by her side, looking for any sign of her family.

The two climbed through the mangled maze of matchstick homes and debris that lined the once familiar streets where her family made their home. They found the street – Murphy Avenue – although the street sign was long gone, blown away somewhere.

They found what was left of the property. No sign of mom or dad or Quinton. Her family had disappeared and she had very little clues pointing to their whereabouts – if they were alive, dead or blown away somewhere. Shawn picked up a piece of one of the walls that lie in the driveway. He told Grace to stand back. Under it was Sarah. She didn’t survive the storm. Drained and dreary, Grace then lost hope of finding her dad and brother alive, now knowing that her mother didn’t make it. And the next day, a mysterious call from someone claiming to be of the Joplin Police Department, informing her that her dad and brother were dead, shot any lingering hopes straight down. *** It’s Wednesday morning, May 25. He isn’t much aware of where he is and doesn’t know what’s happened in Joplin, but a low level of consciousness loomed about with Quinton. He opened eyes for the first time in three days. Dr. Kenneth Larson examined Quinton the night he was flown from Joplin to St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Mo. He had a laceration to his spleen, a lumbar fracture and orbital fractures, Dr. Larson explained in a report by Nick King, a reporter for KODE, a TV station in Joplin. For three days, his family didn’t know where he was and the hospital staff worked to figure his name. In triage, Quinton’s last name was mixedup as Patterson. With enough awareness restored in Quinton, his nurse asked him his name. He was finally coherent enough to say it. Quinton Anderson he told her. And he gave her his dad’s cell phone number.

A broken telephone pole on a street corner near St. John’s Hospital has become a memorial to honor victims of the natural disaster.

Among items Grace and Shawn were able to retrieve from her home was her dad’s cell phone. The two plugged it in to a car charger in Shawn’s truck. It still worked. The battery charging, the two hopped in to the truck and headed out.

They felt the phone vibrate. A text message appeared. “We have information on your son…” the text message read, with a number to call. Grace, believing that her brother was dead, handed the phone to Shawn. She wouldn’t take being told a second time that he is dead. He dialed the number. “What’s Quinton’s birthday?” He asked Grace. “November 16, 1993,” she said. He repeated the date to the nurse on the other end of the line. “Yes, we have him in Springfield,” the nurse confirmed. Quinton was alive and identified. He was found. *** I met Quinton Anderson on a Sunday. It was January 22, 2012, marking nine months since the storm. It was cloudy, 56 degrees and windy. I stood in the driveway, ready to leave my parent’s house, which the storm spared. A gust of wind came up – about 20 miles per hour – nothing like that of the 200 mph winds that were only blocks away from my own home in Joplin. I got in my car and headed south on Duquesne – an area east of Joplin that was hit by the storm as well. What’s left there looks like a scab on a huge wound – slowly trying to heal, but the gash still visible. I met Quinton at Starbucks to “hang out” and talk about the storm. Even before his miraculous survival, Quinton displayed a strong character. He’s an Advanced Placement student taking Biology and Literature and Composition, an

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 18

honorary captain of the Joplin Eagles football team and an aspiring scientist who hopes to someday hold a doctorate in molecular biology and find a cure for cancer. He walked through the coffee shop effortlessly, without displaying any signs of the trauma he endured during the summer. I asked him to take me back to when he was recovering. And so we went. *** “At the hospital, I was so heavily medicated,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t remember that much. But I think it was after… the Friday after when the ICU moved me to the burn unit and I remember getting moved… after that I remember them taking out my chest tubes. I slept a lot too. But after that I started to remember the days and remembering all the people that visited me and the first two weeks I was completely out it,” he told me. He listed his injuries from head-to-toe. He held his hand to the back of his head. “With my skull, I fractured my skull.” He made a semi-circle underhis left eye.

“My left orbital bone – I shattered it and have a titanium plate in it to fix that.” He leaned forward and put his hands on his lower back. “I shattered my last three vertebrae and they took out the bone fractures and replaced it.” Then, his legs. “On my left leg, the muscle that causes dorsal flexion was stripped out of my leg and luckily the tendon was left,” he said. “And the tendon,” he started, “I don’t know how it survived, but I’m so glad it did.” A skin graft was required in order for his leg to heal and resemble normalcy again. And his right leg, he said, was infected with the “tornado fungus,” a rarity that sprung up in Joplin because of debris that filled the air, and had to undergo emergency surgery to remove the infection. The surgery left a large hole and another skin graft was needed to fill it.

Lastly, he said he had small cuts all over from debris in the air.

I asked him what it was like coming to terms with what happened. “My sister tried to protect me from it,” he told me.

“They didn’t want me watching TV or anything to see what it (Joplin) looked like.” At the hospital, Grace told Quinton about their parents. She told him about their mother. And Quinton knew after that, he knew his father was dead. “…a couple days after, when they told me about my mom, they had to do a DNA test, because they never found my dad.”

I was stunned. Eyes wide, I asked him, “They never found your dad?” “The morgue was where they got him from and they had a closed casket funeral,” he said. *** “When I was in the hospital, I was sad, but I didn’t want anyone to know I was sad,” he told me, and of how he hated the therapist assigned to him. “He was stupid,” he said, “I

just don’t like shrinks. It felt really forced and he kept asking me, ‘So what’s your favorite sports?’ and I’d look up at the ceiling.” Lying in the hospital at night, Quinton figured he wouldn’t have his parents when he got out. “I don’t like having people see me cry, so when I was alone at night, I would cry.” But Quinton thought to himself of his parents, “What would they want me to do?” and that sparked him to think, “What do I need to do?” He spent five and a half weeks at the hospital recovering and also learning how to walk again.

Quinton was a wide receiver on the Joplin High School football team. And in the off season, he ran miles upon miles every day and worked out often. I asked him what it was like learning to walk again. “It sucked,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was an athlete…and you don’t know how to walk – I mean, it’s just…” his thoughts trailed.

“For a while I couldn’t feel my legs because of my back fracture. They had to go in and take out the bones and have my donor bone in there and rods and stuff,” he said. “I’d try to flex my foot, which for a while I couldn’t move my foot at all.”

But he started recovering and began with small steps with his physical therapy. “I’d walk from my bed to the door and down the hallway and each day go a little further,” he told me. To speed up his recovery, he asked the nurse to put pillows under his leg at night to stretch the hamstring while he slept. *** In the months since Quinton left the hospital, he has been a part of many media stories and has received a lot of attention for his story. His character shines through the recoveries he has made and great strength he conveys. Unable to play football, he still cheered on his teammates from the sidelines and was still part of the team. He was voted a runner-up in the high school football Rudy awards, which highlights inspirational high school players and awards scholarships. Grace describes her brother as brave, and said, “… he is handling everything that has happened to him much better than most kids his age would. And I know that he is handling the death of our parents better than I am. And I do look up to the kid.” *** In an almost disbelieving tone, I said to Quinton, “All of this had to be hard on you,” unable to fully comprehend how he can divulge the death of his parents and his last moments with them without displaying much emotion. “Yes,” he told me. “But it’s how you perceive it. Do you let it consume you? Or do you just…say yeah, it’s there, it’s a part of me that was the past. What’s for me in the future? I guess it’s that decision whether to get up and walk.”

What’s left there looks like a scab on a huge wound - slowly trying to heal, but the gash still visible.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 19

Photos and text: Whitney Green

I

magine living without a place to call home. Imagine keeping everything you own in a garbage bag. Imagine spending days without food, weeks without showers and countless years feeling like an outcast.

This is reality for many people in northwest Arkansas. An estimated 1,300 homeless live in Benton and Washington Counties, according to the most recent Northwest Arkansas Homeless Census from 2009.

Many have created a family-like environment residing in tent cities throughout Fayetteville. These photos were taken in February 2012 from two different tent cities in south Fayetteville.

Temperatures averaged 40 degrees that month giving homeless people a break from the usually much harsher winters.

“Because the tent cities migrate, it’s hard to say how many there are,” said Sgt. Jason French, who

works for the Fayetteville police. “Usually about six.”

Fayetteville is a prime spot for tent cities because of resources like The Salvation Army, 7hills Homeless Center and numerous food kitchens to serve them.

Each person’s story is different for why they may be homeless, but everyone craves the same thing: community, acceptance and safety. These tent cities provide that for them, Sgt. French said.

“Most people don’t realize what we’re like,” said Vietnam veteran Ben Walker, about homeless life in Northwest Arkansas. “There are bad people out here on the streets, but not everybody’s bad. Every day you wake up with nothing and try to do the best you can to get what you need. It’s an all-day thing.

Ain’t got nothing else. No time for nothing else, just survival.”

Isolated from the world, people in these tent cities have become family.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 20

(Below) Kelvin (last name unknown) is a retired graveyard worker and has lived alone in the woods for 12 years, he said. His only shields against the night are the trees and a tarp he uses as a blanket. “I used to have a tent,” he said, “but people would always find it and slash holes in it with knives. I don’t like people.”

A tent city, hidden in the woods near The Salvation Army in south Fayetteville, is a refuge for many people who are homeless. This tent is a typical shelter for the homeless living in the woods. “We never know when the cops will come and kick us out of here,” one man said.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 21

(Top) Robert Buchanan (Left) and Sgt. Jason French (Right) pose for a picture together. It is common for police to patrol the tent city area in south Fayetteville.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 22

(Bottom Right) While not all homeless people are addicts, substance abuse is often a root issue for many. “I find that the majority of the population here suffers from either mental disease or an addiction of some sort whether it be alcohol or drugs or a combination of both,� Sgt. French said.

(Left) Kelvin talked about when he was a boy, he watched his mother kill his little brother with an iron skillet because he was bad. That was one instance of many that pushed him into solitude.

“Finding a job is nearly impossible when you don’t have an address or telephone number.”

Kevin said, “I’ve tried, but nobody will hire me.”

(Left) What happens when you become homeless? You have nowhere to shower, nowhere to sleep, you’re lucky if you can even eat,” Buchanan said. “Then you’ve got the cops following you.” Days after this photo was taken, the Washington County detainee roster listed Buchanan as being in jail.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 23

DEALING

WITH DEATH By: Emily Jones Photos: Gareth Patterson

A

bout 1,800 people die each year in Washington County. Six hundred have already died in 2012, and Roger Morris, the Washington County Coroner expects about two-hundred more deaths this year than in the past ten years. More people die at night and in the winter than any other time because it’s easier to give up during the early hours of the morning, when everyone else is asleep and no one is thinking about the dying, except Morris.

The Washington County Coroner is a full time position, even before he was officially declared that in 2009. Morris deals with all the deaths that happen in Washington County.

That includes unattended deaths, nursing home deaths, hospital deaths, homicides, suicides, car accidents and prison deaths. On a daily basis Morris will get “one or two calls when it’s slow, and midnight to five it’s nothing to get nine to 15 calls.” He doesn’t sleep, there’s no time, people are always dying. He works more than 80 hours

a week, of which half is spent with the dead, and he is always on call. Our first meeting was delayed three hours because he was getting his first sleep of the week, on a Thursday.

But Morris is used to the sleep deprivation, though he’s not used to the medical ailments like high blood pressure, and the early onset of gray hairs that come along with the job. After ten years as the county coroner and a certified embalmer for 27 years, his insomnia comes from dedication to the job rather than nightmares that might come from dealing with the dead, not the open-casket-style presentation of the dead, the newly dead.

Morris is good. He can tell if a death seems suspicious because of his experience. His father was the coroner of Madison County. Morris said he remembers watching his father pull a body out of a bushhog when he was five while he sat on the ground Indian style.

Morris’ son Hayden is interested too, but he wants his son to focus more in the FBI crime

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Washington County Coroner, Roger Morris, poses

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 25 for a photo outside of the his office. “Every time

someone dies, usually within a month a baby in that family is born. I call them guardian angels.�

scene field. Hayden is comfortable around the dead like Morris was at his age. “I was embalming a body one time in our funeral home and Hayden, who was about seven, was sitting on a chair and he asked ‘Daddy, what are you doing to that man?’” And Morris has also found a way to use his job for teaching lessons to Hayden. His son kept running across the highway without looking. One day at the grocery store Hayden found pictures of a decapitated man that Morris had photographed from a crime scene.

“What happened to him?” Hayden asked. “He didn’t look before crossing the road.”

In his office in the Washington County South Campus, right across from the county jail, he reenacted a scene from the night before. He stood behind his office chair. A lady had been found dead in her recliner the night before.

He mimed checking for any irregularities. He opened where her hypothetical eyes were, shined a flashlight in them. He looked for broken blood vessels in the lower eyelid—a sign of asphyxiation, “I didn’t see anything, they were as clear as yours or mine.” The pupils were bilateral, so it wasn’t a stroke. “Her body temperature was high, so she had just died, and she showed no signs of struggle on her palms and feet.” When I came back to his office later that day he had 11 bottles of prescription medicine scattered around his desk that were confiscated from the woman’s home. He looked up and smiled. Turns out Metamorphin is medication for Type 2 diabetes and “that individual had not been taking hers.” With the case

closed, Morris gets to declare the death a “natural cause.”

Whenever Morris goes to a crime scene, he’s got a checklist to determine cause of death. “We look for signs of lividity because if the police say the body was on its face and stomach, but there is lividity is on their back, it means they’ve been moved.” Lividity occurs whenever the heart stops pumping blood through the body. The stagnant blood will settle with gravity or around pressure points and the skin will take shape of the surface it’s on. After that he checks for knots and bruising, signs of struggle, then heads to the medicine cabinet because that will usually indicate their cause of death.

Morris shut off the lights to show me how to clear a crime scene. Wednesday was a very sunny day and there is a large window on one wall, so he didn’t achieve the dramatic effect we were both hoping for. Morris turned on a flashlight, but decided to go find some better batteries for it. His digressions keep him moving. If he stopped for a moment he would probably fall asleep. He came back and showed me one area at a time on the floor. “This is why we never turn the lights on at a crime scene. You see a lot more with a flashlight.” The brain takes in everything through the sensory register. It discards things that don’t seem important, but in a crime scene everything is important. He sipped from his 24 oz. Diet Mountain Dew, one of 12 he will drink in a day, and sat down. “You find a lot more that way.”

The eyes start to dry out four to six hours after death,

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but until that point, a licensed eye inoculator, like Morris, can take them from the body for organ donation. “It’s actually pretty neat,” he said. But to donate most other organs, you have to be on life support. Except the skin. Morris explained that hospitals use lots of skin grafts, so having a surplus is important. They don’t take it all though, he drew a line across his wrist with his finger, “they cut off your hands here.” He pointed at his collarbone area, they leave that skin too. But everything else is used. He described the replacement of PVC pipe to restructure the arm if the radius and ulna are removed for donation, but wished he knew the medical term for PVC pipe.

Morris became animated when he talked about the postmortem stages of the body, talking fast, as one does when passionate for his job. He explained that after 12 hours, rigor mortis sets in. He clenched his fist and tried to open it to no avail. The joints become stiff in the phalanges, Morris said, and after two days it will recede. But then there is skin-slippage. Morris pointed at his knuckles. “Any skin that holds moisture will begin skin slipping first, think of it as a blister.” He drew a line back to his forearm. That’s how far the skin stretches after day three. From then on it is decomposition.

Some of the bodies in Washington County aren’t found for a couple of weeks if the deceased has no relatives. “We put a chemical agent in them called STOP about an ounce in and it will kill every maggot in there. It’s cleared by the Arkansas state law for toxicology reports.” But the only thing that stops actual “decomp,” as Morris calls it, is refrigeration.

“We keep our cooler right above freezing at 40 degrees,”

said Randall Gallaway, one of the deputy coroners. “It’s the optimum temperature to preserve a body.”

The refrigerator is in the back, behind the three offices in the modern architecture style building. It’s spotless, something that remains a priority for Morris because of airborne diseases that bodies can emit during decomposition. The lab is a vast square room. A large metal gurney is the only thing on the floor. Biohazard signs adorn the walls and tabletops like artwork. There are two industrial sinks and no windows. Morris turns off the lights leaving only the ultraviolet light above the gurney to arrange the space.

Morris uses this to find particles on clothing and also to see if there are any strangulation marks. The blood disappears from the skin when it has been stressed, so he can see marks that might not appear for hours.

The cooler holds the blood for toxicology and the bodies that are waiting for Morris’ transport to Little Rock, or waiting to be claimed by family members. “One body we’ve had for over a year,” he said, but time is running out. The coroners office cremates unclaimed bodies when they can’t locate family members. Morris pulled out a drawer I had thought was another file cabinet. Four boxes bearing four names were cluttered on the left side. “Four bodies in 10 years isn’t so bad if you ask me,” he said. Sometimes families come out of the woodwork after a while to claim the body. The deceased has already been cremated with the Coroner’s budget. Cremations cost between $900 and $1,500, Morris said. “All we can do is hope they reimburse us for the costs.”

To objectively balance dealing with the dead, Morris uses jargon through his thick southern drawl. He calls

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 27

Morris travels with a large amount of his work equipment with him in his truck’s trunk. “I have all of these just in case I get a call when I’m on the road,” Morris said. “I can get to the site quicker when I have my things with me already.”

the bodies “individuals,” not by their names, he says the acronyms for organizations, calls death certificates “DC’s”, tells me that they always use a Form 7 to close a case. A Form 7 is the coroner’s consent to destroy tissues gathered for investigation. But through all this formality, he remembers the names of most of the deaths he’s investigated and recalls in detail the crime scenes.

He has had to embalm his grandmother and visit crime scenes of his close friends. “Every body is the same.” After death they become his job. They no longer have personalities and to Morris, a body is a body.

But he’s not allowed to investigate the scenes of people he knows because it would be a conflict of interest. “I wish I could though, because I do the job right.”

A death certificate categorizes five ways to die: accident, homicide, suicide, natural, and unknown. Morris signs off every death certificate in the county. The only way Morris classifies

a death as a suicide is when there is a note. An accident has to be a car accident, slipping and falling, or death because of a past injury. Natural is strokes, heart attacks, and usually infant deaths. Unknown deaths are always sent to Little Rock for an autopsy. And “you know pretty quickly when it’s a homicide.”

Morris can amend the death certificates if new evidence arises. Last Thursday Gary Conner came to the office looking for the file of McDowell. Conner also recalls every death in the same vivid description that Morris does. “His autopsy came back undetermined because he was so badly decomposed, we had to ID him from his dental records” he said. “It was September 2010 I believe.” McDowell’s friend had a journal that Conner said “reflects distinct suicidal ideologies.” One Wednesday, Morris said he would get to change the death certificate to “suicide.”

There aren’t many homicides in Fayetteville, but Morris said there The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 28

have been more this year, than last year within the same months. If doors are locked or the body is up against a door then it ‘s probably not homicide.

“Death has its own smell.” Morris claims that people emit the smell right before they die, if they are already dying. And he’s found a comfort in death. “Every time someone dies, usually within a month a baby in that family is born. I call them guardian angels.”

Most people couldn’t handle Morris’ job because of the smells, the horrific homicide scenes, the overtime and the taboo of the last moments of death.

But to Morris the taboo can’t exist. It’s 80 hours of his week, but the afterlife is still unexplainable to him.

There is an explanation for the reasons people die. Morris is Baptist. “I believe in God, but I also believe in facts,” said Morris, and I believe I’m going to heaven. “I see a lot of peaceful deaths.

Dying in your sleep isn’t such a bad way to go.”

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The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 29

“Being brown, you have the wisdom of a thousand white women.�

LynntoSciumbato -Schmidt Cece, New Girl takes

care of Igor, a turkey vulture. He is among many birds that Sciumbato cares for at the Morning Star Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 30

Wild

life Rehab By: Yani Ko, Photos: Gareth Patterson

L

ynn Sciumbato is up before sunrise most days. The small-framed woman wakes early to get a start on the laborious tasks involved in tending to her goats, chickens and horses.

After caring for the farm animals, 60-year-old Sciumbato then heads to her freezer — not for a frozen waffle or breakfast sandwich, but for hundreds of dead, white mice.

The mice are fare for the more than 30 raptors — birds of prey (such as hawks, owls and eagles) that Sciumbato looks after. She operates Morning Star Wildlife Rehabilitation Center out of her property on Mt. Olive Road.

Sciumbato’s quaint white house marks the end of a violet-lined gravel road. A boxy pick-up truck sits parked in front of a chicken coop. Nearby, a pair of miniature horses graze — a quintessential country scene in Gravette, Ark. But, away from this corner of the land, on the surrounding 20 acres, a veritable menagerie exists. And it is the core of Sciumbato’s life.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 31

pens I will gladly mentor,” she says.

But until that day, the future of her wildlife sanctuary rests solely in her hands. *** Sciumbato possess a General Class Wildlife Rehabilitation Permit that allows her to care for injured or orphaned animals with the purpose of releasing them back into their natural habitats.

The permit is issued by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and is not easy to obtain. Acquiring the permit demands hundreds of apprenticeship hours as a rehabilitator, a partnership with a licensed veterinarian and meeting minimum cage dimension requirements among other prerequisites.

Despite the obstacles, scores of passionate volunteers have met these conditions and like Sciumbato, possess this state permit.

But, Sciumbato is special among the dozens of wildlife rehabbers in Arkansas. She is federally licensed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services to care for migratory birds including songbirds, waterbirds and, Sciumbato’s particular devotion, raptors. Rehabilitators with only the general, state-issued permit are not legally sanctioned to care for migratory birds.

Sciumbato is one of nine federal permit holders in the entire state.

Sciumbato has a distinctly special relationship with Joey, a barred owl, who has been with her for 24 years. “He had fallen out of his nest and broken his wing really badly,” she says.

A number of owls, vultures, hawks and even bald eagles found a temporary home at Morning Star Wildlife Rehabilitation Center along with song birds, ducks, geese and peacocks. In the spring, Sciumbato takes in many orphaned infant native animals as well, like baby squirrels and rabbits.

Sciumbato, a retired high school teacher, runs the center alone. She has no employees, volunteers, or assistants — no help from anyone. And while Sciumbato has no intention of retir-

ing, certainly not in relation to age, she does say that most rehabilitators with whom she networks are around her age or older and that young, enthusiastic apprentices are not lining up at the flight cage door.

“They must have put something in the water 25 or 30 years ago that made us all think we could do this,” Sciumbato says.

“I trust that someone, sometime will fall in love with working with raptors and songbirds and when that hapThe Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 32

*** Obtaining these permits is a “crapshoot,” as Sciumbato puts it.

“You have to build the cage before you can apply for the permit and then they may give you the permit and they may not,” she tells me.

But Sciumbato is accustomed to this air of uncertainty in her everyday work.

She told me she could rehabilitate an animal for months, but, upon release the bird could get hit by a car or succumb to other unpredictable demises.

As Sciumbato walks around her rehabilitation center, ducks and geese follow her. “The sacrifices I’ve made have been lifestyle sacrifices. Rehab has basically taken over my life for the last 25 years,” she says of her work.

“Any time you release a bird you’re 98 percent sure that they’re fine, but there’s that little margin of error,” she tells me.

Sciumbato doesn’t like an audience when allowing a rehabilitated animal back into its natural habitat.

“When I released an eagle at the Hobbes Visitor Center there were probably 2,000 people there to see this eagle fly away,” she says. She expresses her anxiety about whether the bird will fly away, gracefully and safely, or completely flop.

“I told myself then, when he flew away and did fine...I’m releasing the net eagle at the house,” she says.

Little did I know, she would be releasing a bird that day. *** Sciumbato tells me that she learned the trade from a couple in Siloam Springs. Twenty-five years ago, the elderly couple wanted to retire from

their rehabilitation work.

“When you’re the only person doing this, it’s really hard to retire,” she says. “Then what do people do? So I said, ‘Oh, I’ll do it!”’

She gives me a toothy grin and the breeze tousles her tawny bobbed hair as she looks around at her land.

“I didn’t know it was going to take over my life,” she says with a laugh. *** On a tour of her property, Sciumbato shows me some of the smaller birds in a 10-by-10 foot pen. The cages surround her intensive care building, a small grey shed where the most badly injured birds recover.

I am not allowed to go inside, but she brings out a fluffy owl, young and still covered in its down feathers. She holds him delicately, wrapped in a towel and checks on his injuries sustained from falling from a tree. Sciumbato is hopeful for the owl.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 33

Pigeons perch on top of the 10-by-10 and Sciumbato points out a grackle and a dove with injured wings.

“Truth be known, I should put them down,” she says, “They’re not going to be able to be released...but I just put pigeons in here with them. So, oh well, you know,” she says.

But for raptors and other migratory birds, the regulations are rigid when it comes to euthanasia.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, any birds requiring amputation of a leg, foot, or wing at the elbow or above, or is completely blind, cannot feed itself, or perch upright must be euthanized.

Sciumbato takes the animals that need to be euthanized to a vet.

“I know there are people that can do it ... the cervical dislocation, but I can’t. I don’t want to do it,” she says.

Dr. Hayden, of the Village Pet Hospital in Bella Vista, who has worked with Sciumbato over the past 12 years,

“This is my sweetheart. Aren’t you boy?” she says to Igor. “He thinks he’s people,” she tells me, and I think, in some ways, she thinks “he’s people,” too. performs some of these euthanizations.

He says that Sciumbato never shows her emotions about letting animals go.

“She has gotten so much experience doing it that she knows probably even more than I know as far as what works for the specific animals,” Hayden says. *** Sciumbato shows me around the larger pens that surround the intensive care building. This is where her three permanent birds live.

She obtained permanent possession permits for educational purposes for each bird.

I meet two of these birds, and it is apparent that she has distinctly special relationships with each.

First, I meet Joey, a barred owl, whom Sciumbato has housed for 24 years. He hoots as Sciumbato approaches, his flowing blonde and brown chest feathers wavering in the breeze.

“He had fallen out of his nest and broken his wing really badly,” she says.

The wing had healed, but Sciumbato knew he would not be able to hunt very well. She hoots to Joey in a convincing bard owl call, “Yeah,

sweetie. You’re a sweet boy,” she coos.

“You gonna talk to us some more, sweetie? Hoo-hoo-hoot-hoot, yeah, sweetie. You’re a good boy.”

Joey looks at her, calm and inquisitive, with two big, black globes of eyes.

It is the middle of the day, an unnatural setting for owl hoots.

In the next pen, she introduces me to a turkey vulture named Igor.

I quickly gather that he is her favorite. She speaks to him intimately, and treats him like a baby, though to anyone else, he is an ugly, scraggly bird with a flaming red, bald head.

“This is my sweetheart. Aren’t you boy?” she says to Igor. “He thinks he’s people,” she tells me, and I think, in some ways, she thinks “he’s people,” too.

A sora rail scuttles across the bottom of the smaller cage behind us. We turn around to look at him as he darts back and forth like a roadrunner. He seems anxious and skittish around me.

“When I’m out here I don’t ever talk. He’s very nervous,” Sciumbato says, explaining his behavior.

Sciumbato is almost always alone while she is working at her sanctuary.

The birds are not familiar with human voices aside from her own, and even The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 34

then, she speaks in bird-like noises and quiet, coddling tones.

I began to realize then, and throughout the day, that Sciumbato prefers this solitude. The kind-eyed healer owns a serenity in her acceptance of a secluded line of work.

Sciumbato told me she had wanted to adopt an apprentice, but gave me no signs that she had begun to reach out.

“They will have to come to me,” she says. “This kind of avocation you have to have a passion for and that’s something I can’t recruit for.” *** As we walk to the far end of the bird sanctuary, toward a 20-by-100 foot flight pen, I ask Sciumbato if she has any children, thinking this could be a possible lead for an apprentice.

She tells me she has none and had never wanted children.

cally taken over my life for the last 25 years and my personal life ... has taken a back burner,” she continues. “But that’s not a bad thing when it’s something you love doing.”

She and her ex-husband divorced 15 years ago and she tells me she has “enough babies to take care of.”

We reach the flight pen that contains red-tail hawks and turkey vultures, two types of birds that get along together in captivity. Sciumbato encourages an injured red-tail hawk to fly. The hawk was brought to her with a head injury and damaged wing and she has been nursing it back to health though the winter. The flight pen allows the birds room to strengthen their wings before she releases them back into the wild.

A bird with these kinds of injuries may have had to obtain X-rays or blood work. While her rehabilitation facility runs wholly off of donations, Sciumbato pays for many amenities out of pocket.

Fortunately, vets like Patrick Hayden have been providing probono medical work to Sciumbato for

years.

“We’re not really charging for the services that we provide,” Hayden says. “Sometimes there are things that get done that do have a charge that are out of our control,” he explains.

Sending blood work to a lab in a different state would be an example of a service that he cannot offer gratis.

Sciumbato’s two biggest expenditures, the two large-scale flight pens, were paid for by Walmart, not as a philanthropic act, but because they built a distribution center that backed right into her previous sanctuary on Morning Star Road.

They bought out her land, which she tells me was an unprecedented act

by Walmart at the time, 15 years ago.

“I’ve never really felt like I was sacrificing financially to help the animals,” Sciumbato says.

“The sacrifices I’ve made have been lifestyle sacrifices. Rehab has basiThe Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 35

*** Sciumbato is chasing a hawk back and forth through the huge, dirtfloored flight pen. I am standing outside, watching the red-tail land awkwardly on the wire caging. He is upside down and out of Sciumbato’s reach.

She wears a long, thick falconry glove that goes over her elbow. It is made from a leathery material to protect her arm from the talons. She finally manages to catch the hawk and she brings him outside of the pen. We are going to release him, she decides.

The bird cocks his head to the left to look at me through one severe neonyellow eye. His other eye is damaged.

Sciumbato is holding his talons together and his wings are folded under her arm. It seems at ease with her.

As she had previously expressed, Sciumbato was nervous that the release might be a flop. He may fly right back into the pen, or crash into the ground. I feel lucky that she trusts me not to judge.

And, despite her anxiety, everything falls into place beautifully. She hoists the hawk into the air from her waist and he takes off toward the tree line.

While the red-tail hawk is not an endangered species, migratory bird rehabilitators like Sciumbato certainly are. Though she has no imminent plans to retire, it is something Sciumbato will have to consider eventually.

We watch the released hawk perch on a tree, still on Sciumbato’s land. I stare at the fortunate bird for a few moments and hope for the day when Sciumbato may take an apprentice as devoted as she under her wing.

Dripping Springs garden intern Ansel Ogle of Hindsville carries pallets of Statuses to be planted. Ogle has been an intern at the garden for three years.

(Left) Michael Crane, and Jake Jones work together to arrange flower bouquets on a Friday afternoon in preparation for the Fayetteville Farmer’s Market on Saturday.

(Right) The main greenhouse at Dripping Springs is home to numerous varieties of flowers, as well as young vegetable and herb plants almost ready for planting. The greenhouse allows for the growing of plants year round, and is heated in the winter.

Ariel Aaronson-Eves (right) and Patrick Jones harvest yellow irises in preparation for bouquet making.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 36

Dripping Springs Photos and text: Stephen Ironside

A

local favorite at the Fayetteville Farmer’s Market, the Dripping Springs Garden is located on about 40 acres of land near Huntsville, Ark. Founded by Mark Cain and Michael Crane in 1984, the garden specializes in cut flowers but also cultivates about 30 different vegetable crops. This organic garden provides not only to the farmer’s market, but also to local grocery stores and a community supported agriculture program. While the farm focuses on the organic lifestyle, they are also a proponent of local food.

“There’s so much land around us, so much farm land. It doesn’t make sense for things to come from so far away. We’re just a small drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural landscape,” said coowner Michael Crane.

This local, farming, organic lifestyle is of particular importance to Cain, Crane and their interns.

“Personally, I’m sold on the lifestyle,” Cain said.

“It’s extremely important to keep the agricultural

lifestyle alive and intelligent. I feel like it’s one of the few real hopes we have for the environment and for having real lives as humans. If everybody moves away from the land, and nobody works there on a day-to-day basis, it will be forgotten.

And the various elements that form it, and live in it, the creatures that live in it, won’t be understood.

And all of the decisions about it will be made from afar, and poorly. And we are those creatures. We grew up with them through our evolutionary past.

We have resonances with all of those things. They are constantly affecting us. And that’s what, for me, causes humans to be wholesome people, and have nobility, and health, and intelligence. It’s not knowing the answer to a trivia question on Jeopardy… and so that all maybe seems very far-flunged from the day-to-day reality, but maybe that’s why we’re so grounded here. For one thing, we’re not suffering—we’re having a great time, because the lifestyle is worthwhile.”

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 37

Michael Crane (left) and Patrick Jones prepare flower bouquets to sell at the Thursday Fayetteville Farmer’s Market and to deliver to Ozark Natural Foods. Dripping Springs makes the bulk of its income from flower sales, but also donates flowers to the Fayetteville City Hospital and other organizations.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 38

(Top Left) Mark Cain, co-owner of Dripping Springs Garden, makes tea in the main house after a day of working outdoors. Cain has been interested in eastern philosophies for decades, and relaxes by doing yoga, drinking tea, meditating and playing the piano.

(Middle Left) Located outside of Huntsville, Ark., Dripping Springs was founded in 1984 and resides on 40 acres of land, which they used to produce more than 60 varieties of flowers and 30 different vegetable crops.

(Bottom Left) Mark Cain (left), Ansel Ogle, Jake Jones and Patrick Jones practice Ashtanga yoga in the loft of the barn. Spiritual ties between people and nature played a large role in Cain and Crane’s decision to found Dripping Springs. They practice yoga daily, after lunch, between the morning and afternoon work hours.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 39

REDEMPTION DENIED By: Jimmy Carter, Photos: Courtesy

Editor’s Note: This story was first published in “This Land” magazine.

J

orge “George” Aguilar doesn’t seem different than I remembered from a year ago. His tan face is fuzzy on my computer screen as we Skype 2,200 miles apart. It’s at night and he’s sitting in his mother’s pitch-black backyard in El Salvador with a white hoodie partially covering his face. He’s in an upbeat mood and tries to keep the conversation light, asking, “How have you been?”

When I respond by asking how he’s been, he tells me he’s unemployed. The job market in San Salvador is poor and he is still dealing with culture shock while adjusting to a country he hadn’t been in since he was 10. He’s also still adjusting to the shock that he had to go back. He tries to stay upbeat about his life. The reality is, it’s not that great.

He was supposed to call after his February 2011 court hearing in Tulsa, an appearance he thought would result in his finally becoming a free man again. I had been

interviewing him for a profile highlighting his redemption story, his life as a changed man. I never got the call.

He was imprisoned at the hearing, a sentence stemming from his conviction for an aggravated felony. Finally, after spending almost nine months in prison, he was deported to El Salvador on December 10.

Aguilar, 28, had reformed and was forgiven by the victims of his crime. Nevertheless, he was one of the record 396,906 people deported in 2011 by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. One of the oft-overlooked aspects of the immigration debate is what happens to legal immigrants who commit a felony. Many of those stories, like Aguilar’s, end in deportation. Multiple appeals couldn’t keep him here.

Some redemption stories do not work out.

In November 2004, Jorge Aguilar and two other men drove around the back of a dimly lit church in their gray 1994 Dodge Caravan. They had crowbars, but one

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 40

of them picked up a rock and hurled it through a window.

Some churches had alarm systems. They ran from those.

This church didn’t. They were in.

They looked for laptops, desktop computers, guitars, amps and any money they could find. It was first-come, first-served. They argued over who got what, claiming items for themselves as they dashed through the church.

The arguments would nearly turn violent, but the burglars eventually made a pile of items to steal, pulled the van around and loaded the loot.

The threesome caused about $25,000 in damages to the building and trashed what they didn’t take. The prize theft would have been the new 12-by-20-foot projector screens in the auditorium, but the men couldn’t detach them from their overhead cases. They were able to steal cameras and a computer modem, among other items.

It was the 11th and final church Aguilar and his coconspirators robbed during a four-month span in 2004.

They broke into churches in Tulsa, Broken Arrow, and Owasso, stealing and damaging approximately $250,000 of church property.

In 2011, Aguilar attended the same 10:45 a.m. service each week at a large Baptist church. The same church he robbed that November night in 2004.

“George broke in and found Jesus,” jokes Rev. Nick Garland, pastor of First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow.

Maybe that was God’s plan, but it sure wasn’t Aguilar’s. He entered the U.S. as a legal immigrant to live in California with his alcoholic father at age 10, but was living with a friend, Kary Vincent, when he dropped out of high school in Oklahoma. The guys were close and Vincent’s family gave him his own bedroom in their home.

One night, he went into Vincent’s room and found items he knew didn’t belong to his friend, including a laptop that caught his eye. He was mesmerized. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Where did you get these things from?”

“We stole it from the church right down the street,” Vincent explained. “You aren’t going to tell anybody are you?”

Aguilar assured Vincent he wouldn’t. He went back to bed thinking about having laptops. He couldn’t sleep. He got back out of bed and went to Vincent’s room. Aguilar wanted in.

He would later steal the laptop from Vincent.

Months later, after robbing the 11 churches, Aguilar, Vincent, and others were arrested.

Aguilar was released from jail in 2004 after filing a writ-

ten report and receiving a court date. He decided to try and garner sympathy by writing an apology letter to the churches he robbed. In the letter, he explained he was stealing because his mother in El Salvador was poor and he was sending her money. In reality, he hadn’t sent her anything.

“I know that there is no way that you could forgive me for all of the sin I have done to the church,” Aguilar had written. “I don’t think God could forgive me for what I have done. In fact, I know that God would not forgive me.”

For a while, it looked like Aguilar might be right. Ten of the pastors didn’t respond to the letter. Rev. Garland was the only one to reply, setting up a one-on-one talk that resulted in Aguilar accepting Christ. That was genuine. It made sense. He needed direction.

Shortly after, Garland presented Aguilar to the church.

“George, you came into my office weeping and crying, asking for forgiveness,” Garland said. “God has already forgiven you. I will show you today, the people will forgive you, too.” He asked the congregation to come tell Aguilar if they forgave him.

“Half the church stood up,” Aguilar recalled.

Church members poured into the aisles, rushing to meet Aguilar, telling him they forgave him. They surrounded him, hugged him and held his hand. He was crying. They were crying. He looked up to the pulpit. Garland stood there, arms crossed, looking at the scene with tears streaming down his cheeks.

The church adopted Aguilar.

Members wrote letters to the judge on his behalf. Following the emotional service, he met a family, the Poffens, who took him in.

He worked for Roger Poffen’s flooring business and stayed in the family’s house. He became close with Amy, Roger’s wife. He bonded with the family’s two children, Paige and Tristan.

He finally had a family. *** First Baptist of Broken Arrow was one of five churches that dropped charges against Aguilar. Six did not. He faced five years in prison for the six felonies for second-degree burglary. He cooperated with law enforcement and helped get back as many of the stolen items as possible. He and his friends had kept some, but sold others. He was sentenced to eight months in prison and five years of probation.

Aguilar lived with the Poffens for the next two years, working for Roger’s flooring company. He got to travel on frequent family vacations, a luxury he had never before experienced. Christmases were bigger and better than they had ever been.

He was one of the record 396,906 people deported in 2011

by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 41

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 42

He was still irresponsible, though. He acted like a kid. He and Tristan were buds. They played video games together, watched cartoons. Aguilar would blow his paychecks on clothes and video games instead of saving money to move out.

Eventually, he started growing up. He moved out of the Poffens’ house to live with his brother. He went on mission trips and served as a church youth camp counselor. He fit in well in both settings. His campers loved him. He began reading the Bible often, genuinely curious and wanting to learn. He even listened to sermons on CD while driving the flooring company’s truck in late 2008. Aguilar, at the age of 24, was growing up. He met his future fiancée, Kara Culp, while doing volunteer work. *** Everyone knows that near-death feeling that comes when you lose your balance while leaning the back two legs of a four-legged chair. One moment you’re fine. The next you’re off balance and realize you shouldn’t have been leaning back in the first place.

Aguilar fell in late 2008.

It happened while he was driving home from work. He remembered the letter full of lies he wrote to the churches.

He hadn’t thought about it since writing it. At the time it was written, he hadn’t met Garland. Hadn’t met redemption. Once he accepted Christ, he was caught in a whirlwind of change. New friends. New family. New job. New way of thinking.

The independence he achieved by moving out of the Poffens’ house, the growth he felt when listening to audio sermons in the car, the relationships he’d formed because of his faith—in his eyes, they were part of the lie.

He couldn’t shake the guilt. He was viewed as a celebrity at church. Members regularly approached him to tell him they were proud of him for his life change. “You have no idea,” he would think. It was all tainted.

Finally he broke down and told Amy Poffen. She forgave him, but chastened him. “Brother Nick gives you the money and then you go buy TVs and stuff? You need to pay him back for that. You didn’t do anything but steal that money.”

So he told Garland and Culp. They forgave him. In time, he forgave himself. He felt whole.

Aguilar met Culp while volunteering at Welcomers International in Tulsa, where she served as director for of the outreach program for international students and immigrants. He helped teach English classes and assisted with Thanksgiving and Christmas parties, while leading a weekly Bible study.

Whenever Aguilar passed a homeless person on the side of the road while driving home from work, he would continue to his house, make sandwiches and chips, then take them back, providing a meal and conversation for a stranger.

“That’s just the kind of guy he is,” Culp said.

For a year, he enjoyed a clear conscience, clean heart, and no legal issues. It didn’t last. *** The first sign of trouble came in 2009 when ICE ordered his appearance in immigration court. He was facing deportation. In March 2010, the prosecutor terminated the case without prejudice. Aguilar could still be deported at a moment’s notice, but the prosecutor had decided against taking action.

I met him in late January 2011 to work on a profile story.

We developed a friendly relationship through interviews and, as the story neared completion, he told me about an upcoming court appearance. It was a formality and he was on the verge of being a free man, he thought. Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, a new prosecutor reversed the previous decision. By pleading guilty in 2004, Aguilar had unwittingly given ICE the freedom to take away his residency and deport him. He was going back to El Salvador.

A new immigration attorney, David Sobel, filed appeals on Aguilar’s behalf with the U.S. 10th Circuit and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. He argued that his client wouldn’t have made the plea agreement if he had been made aware of the consequences. Who would willingly open the door to being barred from their adopted country?

The basis of Sobel’s argument is a May 2010 Supreme Court decision for the case Padilla v. Kentucky, which ruled that criminal defense attorneys were required to inform immigration clients of the deportation risks accompanying a guilty plea. Mark Harper, Aguilar’s defense attorney in 2004, had not done that. *** The problem was, the ruling was six years too late for Aguilar. The 10th Circuit Court ruled that Padilla v. Kentucky could not be applied retroactively.

As the appeal process dragged on, Aguilar sat in prison, where he received piles of mail from church members.

He started a Bible study for fellow inmates and preached almost every day, leading more than 20 people to accept Christ. He gave away his commissary food to other inmates. If an inmate couldn’t afford a call home, Aguilar provided his phone card. He voluntarily cleaned disgusting prison toilets and spent hours translating legal paperwork for inmates who couldn’t read English.

“I found myself a lot getting on my knees in the cell and praying for the officers,” Aguilar said. “Praying for the judge that judged me unrighteously. Praying for the prosecuting attorney and the immigration officers who deal very shrewdly with a lot of people, not only me.”

Nothing could help Aguilar. Not even the offices of Oklahoma U.S. Senators Tom Coburn and James Inhofe contacting ICE on his behalf. His actions and attitude went unaccounted for. At least in the eyes of ICE.

The Arkansas Traveler Magazine n 43

“As a human being, it does hurt. I think about it sometimes and I’m just like, ‘Man, I can’t believe what they did.’ It was just so unjust.

You have no idea how much backup I had. Even with that, there’s no mercy. It just shows how much immigration couldn’t give a rip.”

“They don’t take that into account at all,” Sobel said. “It’s shocking to me that they don’t, but that is the law. Immigration law is extremely harsh. There is no rehabilitation aspect to it, with a few minor exceptions. It is very tough when you know the individuals and know what is going on.”

Culp expressed her disgust during a phone conversation. “It’s just the fact that he’s like a number on a piece of paper and no one cares who he is. I lead that ministry and unfortunately, George isn’t the only one. He isn’t the crazy exception. It happens quite frequently.”

Despite keeping a positive attitude the night I spoke with him on Skype, Aguilar admitted that, “As a human being, it does hurt. I think about it sometimes and I’m just like, ‘Man, I can’t believe what they did.’ It was just so unjust. You have no idea how much backup I had. Even with that, there’s no mercy. It just shows how much immigration couldn’t give a rip.” *** Aguilar described to me how he was chained hand and foot on the December plane ride back to El Salvador, a country and culture he had last been a part of as a young child. His mother and sister, Carolina, met him at the San Salvador airport. He barely recognized Carolina. She had been a child, like him, when he left. Everything was different than what he remembered, what he had grown accustomed to in the United States.

“I spent all my life in the U.S.,” Aguilar said when I spoke to him via Skype two months after his deportation.

“So now I’m coming over here. The people are different.

The culture is different. The way people act, speak, handle themselves—it’s different. I just still have an American mentality.”

Aguilar lives with his mother. The average annual salary in El Salvador was $3,431 in 2010. A construction job similar to his in the U.S. barely provides enough money to live off of in El Salvador. Despite the low salaries, he says prices for food and household items are similar as in the U.S. He doesn’t have a car. He was offered an opportunity to field phone calls for a Dell computers customer support call center, a job that paid $700–800 per week—big money in his new old home. He doesn’t want to take it.

“I’m not the type of person that sits in a cubicle taking

phone calls,” Aguilar said. “I’d be miserable.”

He wants to be a missionary and start a church in San Salvador supported by First Baptist, something Garland told him the church would try to help him accomplish down the line. In the meantime, he found a new church in San Salvador and went on a mission trip to Honduras in March, trying to get plugged in to make his ministry goals a reality. He still has a soft spot for homeless people, stopping to provide them with water and food whenever he can, buying trash bags from homeless men for 25 cents even though he doesn’t need any.

In a way, Aguilar is homeless. Despite living with his mother, he can’t help but feel alone at times. He’s a world away from his friends, his pastor and his fiancée. He and Culp got engaged after he was detained, leading me to joke with him that he must be a smooth talker. “She’s says that to me, too,” he laughs. She visited him in mid-February, the first time they hadn’t been separated by a phone line or glass in a prison since his detainment. Her visit was bittersweet. They were reunited, but only for a few days. She is unable to relocate to El Salvador because of family obligations. They Skype more often than they talk on the phone because while he can get 150 minutes of phone time for $3, she has to pay $5 for 30 minutes.

Visiting her in the states is, of course, not an option. His road to reentry into this country will be long and potentially impossible. Sobel has to win both appeals for his case to even be reopened. There’s no certainty either will be resolved in 2012, though Sobel is hopeful, especially after the 10th Circuit Court granted a rare oral argument for May. Even if the appeals are successful, the battle is far from finished. “None of those, if you win, are automatically going to get him back,” Sobel said. “He’s not close to coming back to the U.S. We would have to prevail in all the cases and then move to try and re-open his case and try to get him back. That’s going to be a long and arduous task, assuming that it can even be done.”

From a legal standpoint, Aguilar’s conversion and subsequent reform is meaningless. He might have found Jesus when looking for laptops to steal, but, in the end, he was reserving his one-way ticket away from the only place he’s ever considered home.

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